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Directions: 1. Mark your confusion.2. Show evidence of a close reading. Mark the text with questions and comments.3. Write a one-page reflection on your own sheet of paper.Bench the ParentsBy Buzz Bissinger, NYTIMESPublished: August 22, 2008Like just about every father of good intentions gone wild, I coached a youth baseball team once for kids between the ages of 10 and 12. It was in the mid-’90s, and I was determined to do it the right way: victory with honor, you might say.I bought a little clipboard to keep track of all the players so everybody played equal amounts. I encouraged and I clapped. I treated strikeouts as home runs, giving my little minions a pat on the rump just like the big boys do, whispering such clever motivational bromides as, “You’ll get ‘em next time!” I really did want to do it the right way. I really did want to place sportsmanship ahead of winning. I really did want to involve all the kids, even the ones who were perfectly content to sit at the end of the bench and pick their noses and hold the bat as if it were a toxic waste stick. When my son came in to pitch, I promised not to grimace, or show disappointment when he got a case of the yips with the bases loaded and acted as if home plate were located in Canada. I promised not to get into screaming fights with other coaches, some of whom acted as if they were the vituperative worst of Bobby Cox and Tommy Lasorda rolled into one.Promises....Promises...Promises....As a coach, I was a minor disaster at times. Sportsmanship? Forget sportsmanship. I wanted to win! Not showing negative emotion when my son walked in what seemed like a billion batters with the bases loaded? Forget that. Not getting into fights with other coaches? Definitely forget that.I stopped coaching after several years. I could see the pathology that was overcoming me, the sickness of winning and having my stomach ache when we didn’t win. The sickness of five-minute car rides home with my son that seemed like five hours, as I went through the litany of all the things he had done wrong. The sickness of seeing the frustration and tears in his eyes as he was forced to listen to my addled concept of what I thought it meant to be a coaching parent.And this was not some high-pressure youth baseball organization we were competing in. It was set in a leafy corner of northwest Philadelphia called Chestnut Hill and was sweetly named The Chestnut Hill Fathers Club. Most coaches did make an effort to act with sanity. But still there was excess. There were moments of surrealism, reaching a peak before the start of the season, when we sometimes drafted players on the basis of the size of their feet (the assumption: the bigger the feet, the bigger a kid might grow and hit down the line for power). Not to mention how we talked about them as if we were conducting the Major League draft — brutally, bluntly, without any of the innocent beauty that should be youth sports in America.Need some examples of what the landscape is like out there in the country?Take the under-14 soccer tournament in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., in 2001, where about 30 parents were involved in a post-game melee including one man biting and swinging a metal rod. The apparent cause: an assistant coach for the winning team trying to pick a fight with a player.Take the 13-year-old who three years ago killed a 15-year-old player with a bat after a Pony League baseball game in Palmdale, Calif., because the 15-year-old had apparently teased and taunted him.Take the T-ball coach in Dunbar, Penn., who the same year paid one of his own players $25 to hit an autistic teammate in the head with a baseball so he would not have to use him during a game.Take the fans at a little league game at Concord, N.H., last year, who, upset with the calls made by umpires, threw pizza at them and descended on them to the point where the umps found themselves cornered in a room.The incidents are legion — parents out of control like blithering idiots, coaches out of control like blithering idiots, young players supposedly being taught sportsmanship watching their blithering idiot parents and blithering idiot coaches and learning the very opposite. It all reflects a culture of youth sports in our country that is berserk.“The biggest problem that referees have had with bad behavior has been at the youth level,” Barry Mano, the president of the National Association of Sports Officials, told me. “It consistently has been a problem.”He added: “You have an intersection of the least skilled players and least skilled parents and the least skilled referees. By and large, things are pretty good, but there is this overarching problem.”How much of a problem? Enough of one that Mr. Mano’s organization has helped get legislation passed in 23 states making assault of an official more than a simple misdemeanor charge. “That’s a sad commentary,” he said.How much of a problem? In a survey conducted by Sports Illustrated for Kids, 74 percent said they had seen out-of-control adults at games and 43 percent said there was too much violence in youth sports. And SportingKids magazine, in a survey of more than 3,000 parents, coaches, sports administrators and players, reported that a whopping 80 percent believed inappropriate behavior was destroying what youth sports are supposedly meant to be.Which leads to one of the more boneheaded decisions in the recent annals of Sportsworld — the move by officials of Little League International to allow the use of instant replay during this year’s Little League World Series.On paper, at least, the reasons don’t sound too terribly ridiculous. Because all the World Series games are televised on ESPN, the technology available for instant replay is already there, Stephen Keener, the president of Little League International, told me. It will be exclusively confined to balls that have left the field of play in the outfield and may have done something unseen to the naked eye of an umpire, such as hit the top of the fence or the foul pole.The impetus for it stems from a game in the 2005 Little League World Series when a fly ball, instead of being properly ruled a home run because it had hit the left field foul pole and then bounced back onto the field, was incorrectly deemed by the umpire to have ricocheted off the top of the fence. The ruling meant a double instead of a three-run homer that would have put the team from Maitland, Fla., ahead, 3-2. “I had a chance to talk to the umpire and my heart broke for the guy because he felt so badly,” said Mr. Keener. “He spent the rest of his time here apologizing to anyone who would listen.” Maitland ended up losing the game, 6-2.But apologies aside, this is still Little League. It is still young kids who should be playing for fun, not do-or-die stakes, and not with bated breath waiting to see if the umpire blew it. And all instant replay will do is create an atmosphere that is already too professional and slick, given the insidious influence of ESPN, not America’s leader when it comes to youth sports but America’s greatest instigator of dangerous overemphasis.“I think this makes it too much of a professional sports atmosphere,” Dr. E. Lyle Cain, the fellowship director of the American Sports Medicine Institute at the Andrews Sports Medicine and Orthopaedic Center in Birmingham, Ala., told me. “Little league is meant to be fun. Nobody wants a bad call, but to introduce instant replay makes it too much high-stakes.”Dr. Cain doesn’t come at this as some idle observer. In July, he co-authored a revelatory study in which an alarming increase was discovered in the number of pitchers 18 and under requiring so-called “Tommy John” surgery, in which a damaged elbow ligament has to be reconstructed often because of throwing overuse. The incidence of the surgery, Dr. Cain found, is as much as 10 times greater than it was a decade ago. And one of the primary reasons for that, in his estimation, is pure and simple: “As a society we are getting away from the fact that sports are meant to be fun for the kids. They are not meant to be competitive for the parents. A lot of kids and parents and coaches are trying to make it into professional sports. [We have] gotten so aggressive with sports that we’ve lost sight of what it is to some degree.”The age threshold for Tommy John surgery is 15. But younger pitchers are not immune from overuse. Because they are still generally growing, a growth plate can literally pull off the elbow when a pitcher throws too much. The telltale sign is arm soreness. But as orthopedist Damon Petty points out, that issue is moot for coaches intent on winning at all costs. “A coach who has a 12-year-old who can throw 80 miles an hour is going to have ear plugs in his ears even if the kid is sore,” Dr. Petty told me.And Dr. Cain, in a previous study he did of high school athletes who had Tommy John surgery, discovered something even more appalling — previous to the surgery, most had had only two weeks off from throwing a year. “The only time they weren’t throwing was between Christmas and New Year’s,” he said.Dr. Cain, and other orthopedists, have practical solutions to the problem. Young pitchers, he says, should take at least three months off from throwing each year. Participation in multiple leagues should be limited. Year-round baseball, which is played in some areas of the country, should be curtailed as well. Pitch counts should be strictly enforced; the Little League World Series, to its credit, has done that through a rule change that was enacted last year.But far too many coaches care about winning far more than they care about the kids trying to do the winning for them. Too many parents in general, with fanciful visions of college scholarships and seven-figure major league salaries dangling in their delusional heads, are maniacal in their silly dreams of glory. Instead of setting examples for their children, they live through them, pathetically feed off them. And I know. Because, to some degree, I used to be one of them.And that was before instant replay.Reflection Prompt:In Friday Night Lights, the football coaches seem to care more about winning than they do about their players’ health and wellbeing. Buzz Bissinger, the author of our novel, also wrote this article. Do you agree that many young athletes are under too much pressure? ................
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